Christ, Dean, this is really lame.

You have gone on and on about logical fallcies, then you whip out a straw man of your own. Sheesh.

First of all, you are begging the question by positing some sort of "cheap, easy" way to create nuclear weapons. Then you posit that the discovery is "weird & complex, ... unlikely to be discovered by accident".

THEN you say that it can be reproduced by a 13 year old in a basement for 10 bucks!

Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!

Well shitfire, Dean, it's easy to prove a point when you can manipulate all the givens beforehand. With that approach I can prove that Dubya Bush is the Anti-Christ (a position shared by many liberal universities, I might add)...

Actually, even your assertion that the Manhattan Project would not have progressed as quickly is fatuous. Gee, garsh, fella, yeah, if the United States didn't push (say) the Apollo Program so hard man would not have landed on the moon in July of 1969.

Which doesn't prove a damn thing. So they landed in 1976 instead. On the order of magnitude scale, that's not even a noticable burp. Sheesh.

In the case of Manhattan Project, you do know that the British Empire was significantly involved? And that they were fully prepared to go forward without US cooperation? And that the UK contribution to the research was not insignificant? Try checking out Churchill's memoirs on this.

Aside from this, there is the moral aspect: do you murder someone for something they might do? If you could go back in time, do you kill Hitler as a 2 year old child?

You also completely ignore the incremental of 99.99% of all knowlege. Kill Henry Ford. He invented the automobile, right? Did you get Benz? Or Mercedes? Or any of another half-dozen inventors?

What about "inventing the airplane"? So you kill the Wright Brothers. Do you kill Langley? What about Octave Chanute? Or Bleriot? Or any of another dozen French, British, Brazilian, or (other) nationality? Whoopsie, forgot about those crafty Russkies.

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle have examined the concept of "stopping the advance of science". It's pretty simple. What with syncronicity and all, what you have to do is stop all research, everywhere. Exactly because you can't be sure when a clever idea in microbiology won't prove to be useful in (say) physics or electronics.

Oh, and the arguement against unwarranted cloning? It's a really radical new concept called "malpractice"...

Sheesh...

Your tendency to insult people is getting really old, Casey. In fact, you've been insulting to a lot of people around here lately.

And by the way, your entire message was logically weak and the exact opposite of thoughtful. But I'm not interested in debating it if all you're going to do is insult me.

Please either stop it, or go be an asshole somewhere else.

I dunno Dean, I guess theoretically if the government controlled everything, it could stop all progress in science. But we don't live in that kind of society. The government can keep trying to limit funding, but I think it would eventually get to the point where scientists get fed up and do things privately, kind of like what is going on with cloning I guess. Another similar case is with space travel: there are wealthy business owners who would like to go into space, so they fund engineers to design private space ships. Sure, regular citizens haven't gotten into space on their own yet, but it is only a matter of time. The less the government does with science, the more private industry will do, until a sort underground science network is created.

Oh, I would quite agree that if government won't fund things, it's entirely possible they'll be picked up by the private sector. Indeed, most research is done in the private sector already.

But I find it fatuous to believe that without government support, we would have landed on the moon within a few years of 1969 anyway. I find it fatuous to believe that the atom bomb would have been invented as soon as it was without massive government spending on it. In the particular case of the moon landing, I highly doubt private industry would ever have put us on the moon, and I highly doubt that it will any time soon, unless and until someone can show a hard chance of making money doing so--which remains largely unconvincing.

I also find it fatuous to believe that government cannot impede or slow down research, or to simply assume that research will take place regardless of anything whatsoever that government does. If the U.S. bans all cloning research and leads a worldwide effort to stop cloning research, is anyone really stupid enough to think that it would have no effect whatsoever on the pace of cloning research?

It is certainly the case that researchers can and often do find ways to work around governments, and without government funding. But I do not accept that government action is a complete irrelevancy. It isn't.

Ditto moral issues. Yes, science often is stopped when moralists bang their fists and demand that scientists not do something. The best example being that of research the Nazis and the Japanese did on human beings--people in concentration camps, prisoners of war--that has not been used for over 50 years, because it was so immoral and loathsome. Every few years some scientists want to open up some of that research and try to make use of it, and every few years the world scientific community, and governments all over the planet, comes out against it. So far as I'm aware, that research remains locked up and mostly unused.

Well, I can see how the "stupid" crack can be seen as insulting. I meant the idea was stupid, not you. Mea culpa.

Frankly, I still say that's a lame example you provided, and that it is a straw man.

I'd be interested in hearing your comments on how my logic is weak. I think it's pretty straightforward:
-anyone can prove anything if they manipulate the sitation just to demonstrate their point. Your example is highly contrived to the point of absurdity.

Blocking scientific knowledge in one instance will not block it in others. Example: the Manhattan Project. Much of that research was from Great Britain, and stopping it in the US would not prevent the creation of nuclear bombs, just slow it down. Same thing for the Apollo example.

Ditto for the examples of the automobile and airplane. The threads involving these developments were multiple, separate, and redundant. This is true for virtually any scientific or engineering development.

Again, this underlines the fact that your example is highly contrived and artificial.

Same thing for your proposal to kill that person for something that might happen. I mentioned the old example of going back in time to kill Hitler as a 2 year old. Are you ready to pull the trigger? And what kind of person does that make you? Besides one that fits "the ends justify the means" pattern?

Same thing with the Pournelle & Niven example. They've made it pretty obvious that if you want to suppress some research, you have to supress all, because you can never know what will later prove useful, or seminal.

And ending with what to do about cloning? Malpractice. Simple. A similar argument was made against private use of strong encryption since that might allow criminals to hide illegal activity. A simple solution: a warrant. A criminal can hide things in a physical safe, and be forced to provide the combination under court order. Same thing with providing the key to an encrypted document. A doctor that engages in a practice that has a significant chance of hurting or killing a person is guilty of malpractice, and I am aware of very few responsible physicians that are willing to take that risk as yet. Yes, there are the three establishments that claim to be pursuing cloned humans, but they are liable to malpractice law unless they are out of US jurisdiction, which is begging the question.

Ok. I've gone over my points here just to see where I might have been wrong. I may have goofed with the "stupid" remark.

Ah, I see you do address some of my points in another post. You find them "fatuous". Good argument. Heh. Can you perhaps point out why they are so?

Do recall (for example) that the Soviets were working hard on a moon landing. Actually come to think of it, this is one area where suppression might work, at least until technology gets to the point where it doesn't require an massive government project. Of course you overlook the effect of the 60's treaties on private development. Strictly speaking, right now private property can't exist in outer space. Kinda puts a kibosh on things, eh? So in this case the cooperation of the US & USSR in signing those idiot treaties did hurt private development.

And the 1976 number was an "off the top of my head" number, not a serious prediction.

Same thing with Manhattan. Ok, so maybe they pop a cap in 1948 instead of 1944. Please recall (as I stated in the original post) that a great part of the original research was contributed by the UK, and they had respectable resources of their own across the Commonwealth.

Now I see you ask if a US-led effort to ban cloning will "have no effect whatsoever?" Oh, sure, it'll have an effect. But that's a long way away from your original statement that one "probably can stop the advance of science".

Best real-world prediction: the US bans all cloning research, works hard to get everyone else to go along, and at least a couple of countries don't go along. All the scientists move to those countries who still promote research. And the US shoots itself in the foot. Look at how well the efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation have worked. Basically any country with the requisite economy and technological infrastructure has gotten one. And building a nuke is a lot more challenging than genetic engineering, which is getting easier with every year. Look how quickly they managed to sequence the human genome far ahead of schedule. A lot of the new cutting edge stuff won't be limited to very rich superpowers.

By the way, there is a real-world example of my prediction: the Catholic church banned the concept of heliocentric system. All research on astronomy for the next 200 years was performed in Protestant countries...

But I'll give you one thing: it's easy to ban torture of human beings that masqerades as science. Heh.

P.S. Earlier you mentioned I have been "insulting a lot of people lately". Could you elaborate? I am not arguing, merely inquiring. I don't recall going out of my way to insult anyone. Chaffer, tease, argue with, and use sarcasm on, yes. Then again, one man's sarcasm can be another's insult. On the other hand, I would expect that in a given post I was insulting, someone would point it out. Feel free to respond here or email, whichever you prefer.

Eylo, Dean. I agree with you that the government plays a big part in the advance of science and has the power to speed it up or slow it down. It is just that in your initial post, you said that the advance of science could probably be stopped. I don't think the government would ever be able to bring it to that point the way it is right now. Maybe if the whole world was under one government that controlled everything, it could happen, but what's the likelihood that that form of government would come about?

Look, I hate to be a nitpicker, but a "straw man" is when someone puts forth an argument, and then you accuse them of saying something completely different just so you can demolish that fake argument that they never made. Or you distort what the other person said, and then attack the distorted version.

(I'll shoot you an email about the other thing, Casey.)

My example of the $10 nuclear weapon was a hypothetical, and should be treated as such: imagine someone comes up with a way of doing something horrifyingly destructive very cheaply. This isn't a stupid example. The world is riddled with high tech devices -- electric telephones and wireless radio spring to mind -- which took a ton of theory and scientific knowledge (and some accidents) to create, really took about 10,000 years of human evolution to accomplish, and would be highly unlikely to get done completely by accident. Yet any smart 13 year old can duplicate such technologies with a modicum of money and a well-written set of instructions.

I doubt I could invent wireless radio. But I have no doubt that I could build one if you gave me a decent set of instructions and twenty bucks or so.

You don't know when the next such discovery will be, or what it will be. Imagine if Pons and Fleischman had been completely correct -- any smart kid could have duplicated their experiment with the right tools. (Of course, they weren't right--exactly--but the example is hypothetical.)

In terms of genetic engineering, or nuclear weapons, the number of countries that possess sufficient high tech to do that sort of thing is limited. Enough of them ban a certain form of research, and it'll be slowed down, especially if they exert pressure on others.

And I'm not convinced at all that efforts to stop nuclear proliferation have failed. There are a lot of countries which have sufficient technology and capital to build nuclear weapons. There's no reason why Norway, Italy, Chile, Brazil, Japan, or Saudi Arabia could not build nuclear weapons. They don't, in large part because of diplomatic agreements.

I also repeat my example that Nazi research from the 1940s is still under seal and not under use by anyone (that we know of). Will it remain so forever? I doubt it. But any further scientific research based on that stuff by Mengele and others is effectively stopped by the simple expedient of locking the research in a safe and not letting anyone have access to it.

And that's only happened because moralists have pounded the table and demanded that it be so.

I assert that, since we have at least one real-world example, this proves that you can put a stop to research sometimes. More often, you can only slow it down or delay it. I grant this. So. Is it always wrong to attempt to slow down or delay research? Always?

I think when important moral questions are brought up, it would be as kneejerk to say "damn the torpedos" as it would be to stop all research because God might not like it.

Sushant: I agree with you mostly. I merely point out that there is at least one example where research has been stopped cold, and that was research where Nazi scientists would do such things as saw off a man's skull cap, leave him alive, wake him up, put him into a prison cell, and observe him over the next few weeks to see what happens to a man with his brain exposed to the world. Then, they would start slicing parts of it out to see the results there.

You can't stop research? I'd say we stopped that shit very effectively, wouldn't you?

We don't know if people like the Chinese or North Koreans are conducting such experiments now. But we have no reason to believe they are (God I hope we have no reason) and we damn well know that anyone in the West caught doing that, even on volunteers, would rightly be thrown out of the scientific community, and into jail forever.

Can we really say that research can never be stopped? Never?

I grant that it's much easier to slow down or delay. I also grant that, too often, attempts to slow down or delay research are a bad thing.

But my hypothetical $10 nuclear weapon is meant to throw the question is sharp contrast: is it ever wrong to slow down or delay or research?

Ok, I will agree that a specific branch of research can be stopped as with the Nazi's; I will also agree that there are specific branches of research that should be stopped as with the hypthetical nuclear weapon situation. But I thought the discussion was about stopping the advance of science, which I interpreted as stopping ALL branches of research. I don't believe all branches of research could be stopped, because not all branches of research have the same moral dilemmas that your examples do.